McCaffery: College, pro ball gap might not be that wide for Chip Kelly

By JACK McCAFFERY

Friday, January 18, 2013

PHILADELPHIA — Chip Kelly coached at the University of Oregon, before 54,000 every game, on TV every time, in bowl games, against sharp football minds.

He coached where football was a state-wide obsession, for championships, running an innovative offense, but running a program, an entire program. He had been in press conferences, recruited, dealt with outside distractions. He heard boos, heard cheers and ignored them both.

Now, he coaches the Eagles.Might be easier.

“The game has changed so much,” Jeffrey Lurie was saying Thursday at the NewsControl Compound. “These days, the NFL might borrow more from college football than college football borrows from the NFL.”

Lurie didn’t necessarily target a college coach to replace Andy Reid. If so, he wouldn’t have sent a private jet to bring the Seahawks’ defensive coordinator to his mansion this week for a day-long interview. But he looked quickly toward Bill O’Brien at Penn State, and says now that the Nittany Lions’ coach will make a great NFL leader. And he considered Brian Kelly, who really did exist at Notre Dame. And all along, he wanted Chip Kelly, despite all of the nonsense, the nonsense that said college coaches must fail in the NFL.

“It took 14 days,” Lurie said. “But that’s not long at all when you are choosing a CEO of your football operation.”

That’s what the Eagles wanted, and that’s what they have, Kelly having agreed to a five-year deal, the first, they all hope, of a series. They have someone who sat behind the big desk and made program-tilting decisions, not somebody who ran up and down a sideline and yelled, “Do your job,” to half of a team.

But that’s not how the script reads, so there was Kelly Thursday being asked to justify if he was ready for the promotion to the NFL. Better he should have been asked if the NFL will be ready for the kind of offense he can provide — wide open, aggressive, versatile.

“Football is football,” Kelly said. “This is the highest level. But it is still 11-on-11. You need to get a great coaching staff, good players. You have to be a personnel-driven operation. But it’s still football, Xs and Os. And I have an understanding of that.”

He knows how to work a football field, and how to work an interview room, too. Within three minutes, he had exhibited more genuine personality than Reid did in 14 grumpy years. When he was recruiting earlier in his career at the small-college level, he was assigned to the Philadelphia area, from Harrisburg to the shore. It’s why he was so comfortable lobbing a Vince Papale reference into a friendly conversation , and one about Dick Vermeil, too.

He’ll have time, but not much, to mop up a 4-12 mess left by Reid. He had to have learned that at the big-time college football level, too — that, soon enough, the fans will demand wins, bold-faced and capitalized. But he promises to try and make it work, and not to retreat to the protection of the college game the first time Eli Manning beats him after the two-minute warning.

“I’m all in,” he said. “I burned all the boats. I’m in. I am an NFL coach. If there was any indecision, I wouldn’t have made the jump. I am excited to be here. And I made the jump.”

The Eagles interviewed former NFL head coaches, current NFL assistants and college coaches, and were not convinced that any one avenue to their opening was the safest. But they realized two things: That the pro game is starting to resemble the college game, not the other way around; and that they needed a football-program leader, not one who might become one.

Kelly has managed timeouts, made quarterback choices, gone for two-point conversions, made halftime adjustments and talked to the press about all of it, sometimes when it wasn’t pleasant. And he won 46 out of his 53 games when plenty were watching.

“The big-time is where you are at,” he said. “I’m here. So you’re stuck with me.”